Where’s Waldo? Adjusting Law and Policy for Location-Based Services

Last month, my colleague Christopher Burgess shared some thoughts on the “double-edged sword” of location-based services at the Huffington Post. In his post, Christopher highlighted how these services could alternately be a benefit, and where they might cross a line and become undesirable. Recently, some US Federal courts have heard cases about the legality of GPS tracking, including how and when such tracking should require a search warrant. While it will be up to people with far more legal experience than I have to debate exactly how these decisions will impact individual rights vs. police or government powers, I do think that there is something to be concerned about from a purely technical viewpoint. Whether used by government officials or attackers who have unauthorized access to this information, location-based data could result in a person being picked from a crowd when they least expect it.